Labor solidarity is the focus of this dramatic - and clearly autobiographical - World War 2 tale. Higginbotham's novel is set aboard a U.S. tanker (the fictitious S.S. LIQUID WEALTH) during an early 1942 voyage from Corpus Christi, Texas through the Caribbean and up the Eastern Seaboard. The United States has just gone to war as the novel opens, with German U-boats taking a savage toll against Allied shipping in U.S. Atlantic coastal waters.

Though the LIQUID WEALTH is ultimately sunk by a Nazi sub, Higginbotham's real interest lies in describing the complicated shipboard tensions which have arisen between the vessel's drunken martinet of a skipper, Captain G.C. Bohn (think of Bohn - who drinks 2 quarts of whisky a day! - as a civilian counterpart to Herman Wouk's infamous Captain Queeg), and the ship's 41-man unionized crew. Bohn has total contempt for the labor movement. Rather than take the crew on as a whole, though, the shipmaster focuses his hatred of the seamen's union on the LIQUID WEALTH's "deck delegate" (i.e., union represensative), an A.B. named Palmer Benson Scott (known as "Blackie" to crewmates). Maligned by Bohn as a "Red," Blackie refuses to back down to the captain's increasingly petty attempts to control every aspect of crew life. And, in an ironic ending to the novel, it is Blackie who remains aboard the LIQUID WEALTH after she has been torpedoed (panic-stricken Bohn begins to abandon the ship as soon as the first torpedoes strike) and keeps her on course so that the rest of the crew can safely take to the one remaining lifeboat.

Author Higginbotham is excellent in delineating the LIQUID WEALTH's crew as individuals and in showing how they worked together to so effectively man their tanker. He credits the then-powerful U.S. merchant seamen's union with much of this harmony and points to hostile anti-union figures such as Bohn as being as much an enemy of the working merchant seamen as German U-boats. Also of interest to labor historians are Higginbotham's descriptions of the nuts-and-bolts operations of the labor movement aboard U.S.-flagged vessels during the World War 2 era.